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Belgrade Opens Up With Amps On

At the 20/44 club, named for the map coordinates of Belgrade, the Serbian capital, and set in a wood-paneled pontoon boat docked along the Sava River, Steva Glusac spins tunes.Credit
Marko Drobnjakovic/Associated Press for The New York Times

IT was the first-year anniversary party for Kulturni Centar Grad, an underground club in Belgrade, and a young crowd in vintage finery milled about expectantly. Pink lights reflected off glasses of wine, and cigarette smoke hung in the air. To whistles and applause, a man in a white suit, striped tie and white fedora strode onstage.

With the crowd swaying on their feet, Louie Austen, a 63-year-old jazz singer from Austria, clasped the microphone and belted out a slow, impassioned version of “My Way” à la Frank Sinatra, with a near-perfect American accent. The audience, who switched easily between Serbian and English, went wild.

“I try to explain to my colleagues in the U.K. what is actually going on here, but you can’t explain it,” said Ilija Milosevic, 29, a marketing manager for Universal Music Serbia.

This avant-garde cultural center, known as KC Grad, is emblematic of how much Belgrade, the once-isolated Serbian capital, has evolved and opened up in the 10 years since Slobodan Milosevic’s regime collapsed. Nowadays, the city is awash in contradictions and culture: gritty, gray and raw in most parts, but serene, cobblestoned and quiet in others. Belgrade is both a place to unwind and to amp up.

These contradictions are heard in the city’s soundscape, which blends politics with a heady swirl of folk, pop and electronica. Traditional Serbian tunes have morphed into a popular and sexually charged subgenre of music known as turbofolk. Minimalist techno and hip-hop have flooded dance floors. And more recently, indie rock and classic disco have been embraced with a vengeance — and with a uniquely Serbian bent.

“We were affected by pop only 10 years ago,” said Tijana Todorovic, a D.J. from Belgrade who hosts “Jelen Top 10,” a show about the Serbian music scene on the television station B92. “To this day, underground bands and D.J.’s have bigger followings than pop acts.”

In many ways, Belgrade’s cultural flowering closely resembles that of another city emerging from its own period of trauma. Like Berlin immediately after the Wall fell, Belgrade has become a bohemian free-for-all that attracts Serbian creative types and young travelers more interested in night life than in museums crowded with antiquities. And as in the German capital, there is very little that is quaint about Belgrade, which has not had the face-lift that many European capitals have.

But what the city lacks in beauty it more than makes up for in intensity, which is evident at 20/44, a ramshackle club named for Belgrade’s map coordinates. It occupies a wood-paneled pontoon boat, docked along the Sava River, that is decorated in a style that Milivoje Bozovic, its music director, described as “bordello of ’80s.” Among other retro touches are 17 musty computer monitors stacked like cargo on either side of the cabin.

On a Friday night in April, the D.J. Ivan Zupanc mixed psychedelic rock and spacey disco as strobe lights reflected off a life-size bronze sculpture of John Cleese, while waitresses handed out free shots of rakija, a traditional spirit.

The club’s faded red velvet banquettes are especially packed during the monthly Disco Not Disco party, which often features foreign D.J.’s who play obscure tracks. Recently, Baris K, a D.J. from Istanbul, mined Turkish disco and funk music until 7 in the morning.

“Disco Not Disco is all about playing the oddball,” said Slobodan Brkic, a local D.J. who helped start the party in 2008. “I played a Bosnian folk song three weeks ago, which kind of shocked pretty much everyone.”

Belgraders’ taste for the eclectic goes back to Communist times, and is inextricably linked to the country’s politics. “This was the only way of expression that had a green light,” said Dragan Ambrozic, a respected music writer who works at Dom omladine Beograda, a cultural center.

Banned from forming political organizations, young people in the 1980s and ’90s used music to create communities and to criticize politicians. A band known as Dza ili Bu wrote a 1996 song, “Vecna Lovista,” about the rising drug problem under Milosevic, while Rambo Amadeus, an admired and sometimes controversial performer, urged Serbs to turn off state-programmed television in his 1993 song “Karamba Karambita.”

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With this sort of stormy, emotional undercurrent, music of that time did not end up sounding like candy-coated boy-band pop. Instead, it was off-kilter and brash — and it didn’t sound like anything else.

Music remained a bonding force after the first multiparty elections in Serbia in 1990. The explosion of techno parties coincided with the 1992 imposition of United Nations sanctions on the Yugoslav federation, which then consisted of Serbia and Montenegro, in response to the Bosnia war. Among other things, this embargo required that all trading cease and all traffic links to and from the country be suspended.

By 1995, it was so rare to see foreign acts in Serbia that when Laurent Garnier, a French techno D.J., played in a unused airport hangar in Belgrade, he was given an official ceremony by City Hall and presented with keys to the city by a mayoral representative. This honor was also bestowed upon the Prodigy, an English electronic band known for heavy eyeliner and manic live shows.

During this time, rock music began to be supplanted by turbofolk, a speeded-up form of dance music with folk influences and brass band elements, which gained in popularity during the Milosevic years and continued to dominate the airwaves even after he was deposed in 2000. For many in Belgrade’s underground music community, listening to turbofolk is a slightly stressful experience, because of the political associations it conjures and the scantily clad women who sing it.

“It is very loud, so you cannot avoid it,” said Rambo Amadeus. “But I keep trying.”

BUT in the last three years, an old sound has re-emerged. After years of suppression and much overshadowing, rock music is once again commanding the city’s club and festival stages. Spearheaded by the psychedelic rockers Petrol, the electronic pop collective Svi Na Pod! and the post-punk trio Repetitor, the Belgrade underground is finding a new voice.

“It’s live, healthy and growing,” said Ilija Duni, the singer and guitarist of Petrol, who are playing in the Netherlands for the first time this month, thanks to relaxed European Union visa restrictions for Serbians. “There are a lot more concerts, people practice more, and we are influencing each other.”

On a recent Friday, the nightclub Tube ran into a bit of trouble. Steve Bug, a celebrated D.J. from Berlin, was supposed to play a 2 a.m. set in the sleek, dark gray club located in a former nuclear fallout shelter. But volcanic ash had closed much of Europe’s airspace, and Mr. Bug was unable to fly in.

Luckily, Ms. Todorovic, the television D.J., agreed to spin at the last minute. In the early hours of the morning, she took over the turntables, satiating the party-hungry masses with deep house records and CDs she had grabbed at her apartment after attending KC Grad’s first birthday.

“Belgrade is not an easy crowd,” Ms. Todorovic said. “But if they like it, they show it in a warm and passionate way.” Her set ended as the sun rose, and the crowd gave her a rousing ovation.

IF YOU GO

HOW TO GET THERE

Flights to Belgrade from New York City generally require a connection. A recent online search found a British Airways flight, through Heathrow, starting at around $1,300 for travel in June. A taxi to the city center is about 1,300 dinars, or $16 at 81 dinars to the dollar.